Dr. Usman T. Malik #AsianPacificAmericanHeritageMonth #APAHM #AAPIHM
Today we Pakistani-American author Dr. Usman T. Malik.
From Lightspeed Magazine:
His fiction has been reprinted in several years’ best anthologies, including the Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy series, and has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award, the Million Writers Award, and twice for the Nebula. He has won the Bram Stoker and the British Fantasy Awards. He is a co-founder of the Salam Award for Imaginative Fiction, which seeks to nurture science fiction writers of Pakistani origin.
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The short story as a literary form is a modern construct. We had myths, legends, parables, folktales, allegories, and fables first. The characters in my stories and the author of those characters have been struggling under the burden of a past so vast and mysterious that the term short story didn’t seem true to me, especially since the modern Pakistani or Pakistani diaspora short story has mostly been rooted in the “real.” The single most important writer of the modern Urdu story, Naiyer Masud, works a crystalline prose that has the paradoxical effect of accentuating the impenetrability of his uncanny stories. If fables are lies that narrate useful truths, no writer has crafted better subcontinental fables than Masud. I hope some of my fables will aspire to a similar level.
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